Quinces are now in season but in my town they are nowhere to be found. They are not on the standard supermarket fruit list which is offered 12 months of the year. They are not even on offer in our one independent greengrocer.

If you are not familiar with quince - it is basically a cooking pear. It has a hard flesh which if cooked for a long period turns a red colour. However I have hardly ever eaten it in this country. I recall my grandmother talking about growing and making things with quince but do not recall her ever serving anything. Perhaps that was from the time before I was born when she lived in the Kentish orchard country. I have heard of people making quince jelly and found the same at a cheese counter at Sainsburys in Reading once.

Abroad I have had it more often, for example on a trip to France last year. My late mother-in-law in Holland regularly boiled stoof peren (literally 'stove pears') and served them with meat and potato dishes in the Autumn. However they have been obviously historically part of our diet as shown by Ivan Day's Historic Food website. That website even states

There are far more recipes for quinces in seventeenth century English cookery books than for any other orchard fruit.

 
I bought the quinces in the photo in Holland a few days ago. They seem to be readily available there.  I will make my first attempt to use them in due course.

My middle son loves sushi though he had never previously been to a sushi restaurant. His first experience was when we spontaneously made some on a camping holiday. Subsequently we have had a few amateurish attempts to make nigiri sushi or rolls at home.

I have mainly eaten sushi in California on business trips; there there is the benefit of great fresh fish from the Pacific plus a local Japanese population. I have had sushi in Munich and Paris but not so far in the UK. I am aware that these days there are plenty of places to go to in London but very few in central Southern England.

A year ago, Mrs Oregano and I visited Funki Sushi in Bournemouth. We had a few sushi dishes and were happy with what we had. So when my middle son had his birthday we suggested that this might be a good venue for a family birthday celebration last Saturday.

This time round we studied the menu before going. There are a range of sushi dishes on offer but the bulk of the main courses are described as "fusion" with various Thai, Malay, Chinese and Japanese dishes.

The restaurant is only about 300 metres from Bournemouth pier - a bit up the hill towards the centre of town. It is on the top floor of a building and in fact there is no solid roof. In summer the canopy can be rolled away which is probably fun in dry, warm weather - I wonder how cold it gets there though if it is a frosty winter!

As would be expected in a Japanese establishment the furniture has clean lines. My youngest son mocked that Mrs Oregano and I would not get our bottoms into the chairs which were fairly narrow and had solid sides. Well, we did with some centimetres to spare but fat-bottomed girls or guys might get stuck!

We ordered four dishes which were sushi rolls. Most were 'inside out rolls' - a small inner core wrapped with seaweed then rice and sometimes sesame seeds on the outside. My youngest son normally does not like fish - so we ordered "chicken dumplings" which were basically pot stickers. To my amazement he tried all the sushi variants and liked the unagi roll and "typhoon roll" (basically a tempura prawn roll).  The rolls were priced between £3.75 (vegetarian) to £6.75 (tempura + unagi) for six pieces. We did not try the nigiri sushi this time.

There was no sushi bar as such so we did not see the sushi being made - always an entertaining thing if you are on your own! - but some was stored on the counter with the preparation presumably out of sight in the kitchen. I liked all the rolls I tried, though the wasabi seemed insipid. One of my boys challenged me to eat a largish lump of wasabi and it did not blow my nose off. The wasabi I have bought at home from Waitrose (in a sort of toothpaste tube) was defintiely more potent.

The boys were still hungry so we ordered a variety of main courses. All were well prepared though some were more enjoyable than others. Those who ordered noodle dishes seemed to do very well. One of our boys really enjoyed the 'Phad Nua Rummit' (meat, vegetables and egg noodles) while I failed to notice that the 'Volcano Udon' was served in a stock and was like a meat and veg soup. It tasted fine and was prepared well but it was not what I was expecting - should have read the menu more carefully. Most main courses were between £7.95 and £12.00. We ordered too much rice (you never know how big a 'portion' is) and a delicious side dish of tempura vegetables.

Service was a bit strange; something my wife and I noticed on our previous visit. All the waitresses were polite but they seemed totally uncoordinated with each other. Four different waitresses served us but they seemed to have no idea what their predecessor had taken in orders or brought us - we had to organise them. I worried that we would not be charged the right amount but in fairness that was spot on.

We had a good evening. This was not the most classic sushi spot but it was a good all-round Asian food experience. However I am not aware of any alternative sushi places nearer than London. If we go again I will not order a sushi and main dishes but one or the other. We ended up going over budget and did not finish our main courses. However we would go there again.

I was wondering what to serve with some sweet chilli sausages. Having already decided to experiment with parsnips today the obvious choice was a parsnip mash. Parsnips are sweeter than spuds so it seemed like a good choice. As posted earlier I have not experimented a lot with parsnips and never done mash before (what a wimp!). It is very easy and in this case very similar to using potatoes.

Parsnips seem different. Not only are they a completely different shape to potatoes but they are less dense. You notice that when you boil them in a pan as they float better. I thought it would be good to add roast garlic and shallots to the mash.

Serves 4

Ingredients

8 sweet chilli sausages (more if you have hungry teenagers)
500 g parsnips
6 shallots
4 large cloves of garlic
olive oil
salt and pepper
100 g thin green beans
4 slices of Black Forest ham

Method

1. Pre heat oven to about 180 Celsius
2. Peel shallots and garlic cloves. Lightly salt them then slosh a little olive oil over them. Put in oven covered with foil.
3. Top and tail the parsnips and peel them. Roughly chop them and put them in a pan of cold water and bring to boil for 20+ minutes. Drain the water.
4. Parboil the green beans for 5 minutes.
5. Halve the rashers of black forest ham and wrap around a portion of green beans. Put them in the oven 20 minutes after the shallots
6. Start frying or grilling the chilli sausages.
7. After 30 minutes in the oven, remove the foil from the shallots and garlic.
8. After 10 minutes remove the shallots and garlic and mash with the parsnips.
9. After 20 minutes in the oven remove the green beans.
10. Serve the parsnip mash, sausages and green beans with a shallot or onion gravy.

Tips

a) If you happen to have water boiling when you are peeling the shallots, put the shallots in the boiling water for about 2 minutes. You can probably remove the skin with little knifework.
b) I have made the above method description look very complicated but it is fairly straightforward.

Verdict

My son who generally does not like potato mash said he would be happy for me to make parsnip mash again. Another son said he liked it but preferred potato mash....but maybe they were being polite!

Request

I must be a pretty lousy food photographer; I dislike the photo above but did not manage anything more presentable. My camera broke so I have tried another one but the lighting in my kitchen seems to be terrible and the other photos I took were out of focus. I am open to any tips on amateur food photography as I have a bit to learn...

It is easy to forget that many of the ingredients we use today are not native to Europe. I recall, in my youth, a teacher pointing out the artistic inaccuracy of an illustration of a medieval banquet complete with turkey and potatoes! Yes, the potato (and the turkey) is now an essential part of modern European cooking, but it was not always the case. In Britain, before the potato the parsnip played an important role. It has many characteristics that are similar to a potato but looks like a white carrot.

For blog visitors from outside the UK I am including a photo above. When I lived in Germany I never saw parsnips for sale. My sister in law in the Netherlands says that a number of TV programs there have said that it is a very healthy vegetable but she cannot find it in her local greengrocers.

Apparently it was more widely used in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. In my lifetime it has been a typical British winter vegetable and in my experience mainly served as part of a roast dinner. I have always liked roast parsnips but have little experience of using them otherwise.

I have been interested to see a number of food writers like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or Nigel Slater advocate other ways of using parsnips in their books and indeed a better use of winter roots generally. However while there is a huge body written on how to do potatoes right the references to parsnip are fairly light.

I have previously tried doing a parsnip-based pan haggerty which was a real success. However, when last winter I tried occasionally to use parsnips as if they were potatoes I hit some problems. For example, I have often thinly sliced raw potaotes and deep fried them; the results were pleasing to my family. I figured that since less time was needed for roasting parsnips than for roasting potatoes the same should work with thinly sliced parsnips. Not so! The parsnips fried at about 180 Celsius were a lovely golden brown on the outside and a bit raw and fibrous on the inside.

I concluded that either I needed to parboil the parsnips or try a different oil temperature. Today I decided to experiment a bit with parsnips now that they are coming into season and tried parboiling. Parboiling for 10 minutes seems to do the trick.

I tried both shredding the parboiled parsnips with my mandolin to creat chips (left) and did 3 mm thick slices as crisps. Both fried very rapidly and were both golden coloured and crisp on the outside but with a good texture inside. My sons said they would definitely be happy to eat them again which is a seal of approval in my family!

As a rule, I am suspicious of any French terms used in cooking in this country unless it is genuinely about food from a Francophone country. I suppose this comes from the late 1970s and 1980s fashion when many British restaurants would pretentiously use French expressions in what were otherwise ordinary menus as an excuse to charge lots of money for supposedly "posh nosh". I recall my Dad - who was then a manager with a wellknown British bank - explain that his posh dinner included mousse d'Arbroath smokey! Yuck! Arbroath smokeys are a traditional Scottish way of treating haddock and have nothing to do with France!! This is not to put down French food which, on the whole, I love....but let's keep the French for Francophone dishes!

About half a year ago I read an Independent article about Anton Mosimann and his influence on modern British cooking. He apparently has been an influence on Heston Blumenthal among others. A week ago I did a search on the Amazon website for books from Anton Mosimann and came up with Cuisine Naturelle among others. Although it can be bought new, it was on offer from £2.35 second hand so I could not resist that. As you can see below the copy is not in bad condition and even the coversheet is not too tatty. BTW to find the book use either  ISBN-10: 0333379713 or ISBN-13: 978-0333379714 .

Since getting my copy this week I have been reading it, though I have not yet followed any recipes consistently. It is very interesting reading as he (Anton) is keen to do healthy cooking based on fresh and seasonal ingredients...exactly what I love. However he is very serious. While I understand that he might not be happy in his Swiss working time reducing cream by a factor of 10:1 for his sauces, he rules out most oil, sugar, butter, cream and alcohol for cuisine naturelle. While I advocate being sparing on salt, oil and cream he is VERY challenging and thorough. However, I want to avoid giving the impression that he is some sort of nutty fundamentalist. He advocates cuisine naturelle as being a new approach to healthy cooking while acknowledging haute cuisine with its butter, cream, etc as a legitimate, but less healthy, way of cooking.

For savoury starters and maincourses he relies a lot on good home-made stocks. I must admit I have rarely made my own stocks and bought stock cubes tend to be salty. I am not sure if I make a stock from a cube that I will achieve the healthy results that he aims for. For example, rather than using a mixture of oil and vinegar in a salad dressing, he uses reduced stock and vinegar. If I had time to do my own stocks I can see that is very interesting as an alternative and would involve less calories. However this will require more discipline than I have today.

With regard to cooking he avoids conventional deep-fat or shallow-fat frying but focuses on steaming, grilling, poaching, blanching and dry frying with a non-stick frying pan. This is all much healthier than what I do....even though I try to start with fresh ingredients.

His philosophy is to bring as much of the taste of the ingredients out in the dishes. He avoids alcohol, butter or cream-based sauces. This makes sense to me and I appreciate his statement that herb mixes should reduce the requirement to use salt by 50%. I have high blood pressure and I have tried to cook with limited salt, however despite my generous use of garlic, herbs and spices to provide flavour without salt, Mrs Oregano and my kids tend to add a lot of salt anyway :-( .

For a book published in the UK in 1985 it is unusual in emphasising presentation of food in a modern way; probably a reflection of Mosimann's experience in the Far East. However my copy has the 1980s limitation in printing technology which means that the colour illustrations rarely are close to the black and white text describing them.

While I will try to adapt my normal cooking to a few ideas seen in the book I have not really tried Cuisine Naturelle out yet. However the book is an interesting read and I appreciate Mosimann's understanding of the science of food. It will certainly challenge me to follow his ideas rigorously but that is not to say that the ideas are not good.

I certainly recommend anybody getting (at least a second hand) copy of the book.

In 2005, Jamie Oliver had a well-publicised campaign to point out the disgraceful state of school food in this country. Having banned our kids from their school canteen when we found out that a typical meal was pizza, beans and chips followed by a sticky bun, I thought his campaign was most welcome.

Since then school dinners have been reformed with requirements to use fresh ingredients and less fried food. So far so good, but our privatised school food sector of course has pathetic budgets to work from. It is also not reasonable to expect schools to change the bad eating habits of a generation without targetting the parents too. That was illustrated by two Rotherham mothers in 2006 who instituted a "junk food run" to feed 60 children their lunches from local takeaways.

It is perhaps not surprising that a report today shows that children want to eat chips and that uptake of school food is dropping. This is despite children being far more aware of what is healthy or unhealth.

· Three of the primary schools visited reported that younger pupils could not manage a knife and fork

· Some schools misunderstood the "five-a-day" fruit and veg recommendations and included potatoes

· One teenager told inspectors that he had become far fitter as a result of regular walks to a nearby chip shop

· Pupils snacked on fizzy drinks and sweets on the way to schools

· At one secondary school counsellors were brought in to help a group of high-performing year 10 girls who smoked and were involved in substance abuse, and were skipping meals in an attempt to lose weight

· Pupils frequently said that the portions were small and left them still feeling hungry

However much the government tries to use schools as a means of influencing social attitudes it is pretty pointless reforming school food without addressing parents. How is a child - used to lots of chips and junk food at home - going to choose lower fat, lower sugar, lower salt healthier options at school? If parents supply their little ones with sugary fizzy drinks, crisps and sweet snacks to take to school aren't they going to lose their appetite?

We will only have healthier eating among children if parents make healthier choices.

Well, I am a bit slow of the mark...I have just realised that it is British Food Fortnight and we are already in the last week! The goals look worthy with an emphasis on good, locally-sourced food and to cultivate an interest in British food. Well, I am not going to find time to try any of their local events unfortunately.

Today they published the results of a survey about children's awareness of regional foods. The results were not particularly encouraging for British food

The study reveals a worrying gap in children's grasp of home-grown delicacies.
One half (54 per cent) do not know that pasties come from Cornwall
Eighty per cent do not know that hotpot hails from Lancashire
Most surprisingly, over half (57 per cent) do not know that haggis is a Scottish dish

Children do not even seem to know about foods originating in their own backyards.
Thirteen per cent in the North West believe hotpot originated in London
One in five (19 per cent) children in the South West believe that cheddar cheese comes from the Midlands, rather than its Somerset base
Only 39 per cent in the North West know Manchester gave birth to Eccles cakes.

 What are we to make of this. Are kids only familiar with junk food like deep pan pizza, chicken nuggets and junkburgers? Or have we simply moved on in the UK and have adopted a lot of food from abroad? My kids would certainly know about haggis, pasties and hopefully cheddar cheese, however they have only rarely had Lancashire hotpot and probably have never had Eccles cakes.

I have fed my kids plenty of things from abroad like pasta, chinese and indian dishes. Perhaps though they have not been exposed a lot to traditional British fayre at home. However, I think it is more important to use fresh, seasonal food regardless of cooking style than simply to cling to tradition for the sake of it.